What Would Trump’s Military Parade Symbolize?

In Russia, Vladimir Putin has relished and weaponized the military parade.

Photograph by Alexander Konkov / TASS / Getty

Donald Trump has asked the Pentagon for a military parade. “I want a
parade like the one in France,” he said, referring to a Bastille Day
procession he attended, according to the Washington
Post. This can hardly tell us anything new about the President; he has
expressed his wish for a display of American military might repeatedly
over the course of many months. That his perseveration has gradually
transformed into an order is an important lesson in the way Trumpism
turns the most absurd rhetoric into reality. But the most important
aspect of the likely future parade is the meaning it will acquire in
American culture and politics.

In the imagination of the Cold War era, military parades were the thing
that the Soviets did. This notion was not entirely historically
accurate—the United States paraded its own might in Washington on a
couple of occasions during the Cold War. But it made for a powerful
image. I still have a mounted copy of a New Balance poster from the late
nineteen-eighties or early nineties, depicting a jogger—the very
picture of Americanness, rendered in color—running in the opposite
direction of a black-and-white Soviet parade in Red Square. The tagline:
“Why runners make lousy communists.” Military parades, it went without
saying, were a feature of totalitarian regimes and the opposite of
freedom. (In 2016, the New Balance owner and chairman, Jim Davis,
gave nearly four hundred thousand dollars to the Trump campaign.)

Around the time of that ad campaign, the Soviet Union held the last of
its military parades—on May 9, 1990, to commemorate the forty-fifth
anniversary of victory in the Second World War (these parades had taken
place on the big anniversaries, in 1965 and 1985) and on November 7th,
to mark the seventy-third anniversary of the October Revolution (these
parades had been held annually). After that, the parades were
discontinued until, in an effort to mend a torn and disillusioned
society, President Boris Yeltsin haltingly brought back the Victory Day
parade. The step was politically fraught, both domestically and
internationally. It made clear that Yeltsin was abandoning any hope of
forging a Russian identity that wasn’t tied to notions of imperial
greatness. Also, Western leaders, including Bill Clinton, did not want
to take part in parade festivities in 1995, when Russia was prosecuting
its first brutal war in Chechnya. Yeltsin had the parade moved off Red
Square and separated from the official celebration of the fiftieth
anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The next parade wasn’t
held for another four years.

Vladimir Putin, by contrast, has relished the parade and weaponized it.
For my most recent book, “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism
Reclaimed Russia,” I made myself sit through video recordings of the
military parades held in Red Square on May 9th every year since Putin
came to power. The display is subject to inflation: five thousand troops
took part in 2003 (I couldn’t find earlier numbers) and fourteen
thousand did so in 2012. Pieces of military equipment—tanks and
rockets—were added in 2008. An air show was added in 2010. The parade is
the central event of the Russian political year, and it reflects
contemporary Russian identity: great, frightening, built entirely around
the victory in the Second World War. The Russian sociologist Lev Gudkov
has said that the victory is a perfect national myth, because it shines
its light both on the past and on the future: it explains how the
U.S.S.R. became a twentieth-century superpower, and it justifies the
terror that preceded and accompanied the war.

The Bastille Day military parade in France that apparently inspired
Trump is not exactly free of connotations of terror, but its over-all
symbolism is more
appealing.
It celebrates the power of the people who overthrew the monarchy and won
freedom (though they certainly didn’t wear uniforms or march in
lockstep).

What would an American parade signify? Trump’s understanding seems clear
on the surface: he thinks that parades go with the Presidency like
gold-leaf furniture goes with wealth. Also, Trump wants it seen that
he—and not the generals who are charged with taming him—is the
Commander-in-Chief. Plus, his button is bigger than Kim Jong Un’s.

But, demagogue that he is, Trump is also tapping into something deeper:
a sense of lost American greatness, and, even more, a sense of a lost
American story. In this way, the United States isn’t different from the
rest of the Western world, which has suddenly discovered that its
post–Second World War story is no longer as convincing as it used to be,
and can’t serve as an anchor for its identity. The rise of the right in
Europe is a symptom of this phenomenon. Sweden, which in the wake of the
war forged an identity as a humanitarian superpower, has seen that story
punctured by the meteoric rise of an anti-immigrant right. Germany has
seen the unthinkable: the rise of a far-right party that explicitly
rejects the idea that Germany must continue to reckon with the ghost of
Nazism. And the United States has a President who has no use for stories
like “America is a nation of immigrants,” and who is trying to make
America great again by ordering a military parade.

The Postreports that the Pentagon wants the parade to be held on Veterans Day, which
originated with the victory in the First World War. It’s hard to imagine
an emergent identity story tied to the triumph of 1918. Independence Day
has apparently been floated as an option; this would most closely
resemble the symbolism and the season that Trump observed in France.
What if the parade is scheduled on Memorial Day? Given that holiday’s
origins, it might
occasion a conversation about the place and symbolism of the Civil War
in American history. With this President leading the conversation, one
shudders to imagine it.

I sometimes joke that growing up in the Soviet Union prepared me for working as a journalist in the United States. That joke has become less funny.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.